April 2026: Google Meet and Google Workspace Update Recap

Google Cloud Next ‘26

Google Cloud Next took place in Las Vegas last month. There, Google shared all of their latest innovations and announcements around Google Cloud, Google Workspace and the agentic capabilities of Gemini. One of the key announcements was a new system to underpin the AI capabilities of – and within – Workspace applications, Workspace Intelligence.

Workspace Intelligence is Google’s new system for surfacing relevant information from one Workspace app within another, weaving together scattered information to help you ✅ complete your tasks across Google Workspace. By enabling Gemini to analyse and understand the context of your work, it’ll be able to assist you with your tasks whilst being grounded in your Workspace data and requiring ✍️ lower-context prompts. It’s a system designed to work in the background, gathering information when needed, understanding your work priorities and tailoring the output to fit your working style. As part of its release, Workspace Intelligence will appear across a variety of features within 💬 Chat, 📃 Docs, 📈 Sheets, 🖼️ Slides, ✉️ Gmail and 🗃️ Drive with some of the first features detailed below and rolling out now.

Google Meet

Google Meet for 🚗 Apple CarPlay rolled out at the start of April. With this update, if you have an iOS device you’ll be able to take advantage of your time on the road to safely 📞 join meetings and view your 🗓️ upcoming schedule from the car’s dashboard.

In the following week, Google Meet’s speech translation began rolling out to 📱 Android and iOS. The feature enables real-time 🔊 audio translation during a call in a 🗣️ voice that matches the speaker's. This update ensures that, even 🏃 whilst on-the-go, you’ll be able to collaborate in meetings consisting of global teams with minimised language barriers. Translations are currently supported between English and one of 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German, 🇮🇹 Italian, 🇵🇹 Portuguese and 🇪🇸 Spanish.

In mid-April, Google announced that they had 🏆 certified four additional Lightware peripheral switchers for use in Google Meet spaces equipped with Chrome-based Google Meet Hardware and touch controllers. The peripheral switchers enable single-cable BYOD, allowing you to use one cable to connect your own devices to the meeting room’s hardware, taking control of the room’s 📺 displays, 📷 cameras and 🔊 audio.

Starting last month, high-resolution displays will now adjust to show 💎 sharper and more detailed video quality when joining from a space with 📹 Google Meet Hardware or via the 🌐 web. As higher-quality videos require more bandwidth, the update is designed to automatically scale the quality back if your connection becomes unstable. This helps to ensure a seamless video experience during your calls. Addionally, 🧑‍💻 admins will also later gain a new setting to control and manage the default video quality and bandwidth used within the organisation.

Previously available in early preview, “Connect room” began rolling out to all Google Meet Hardware towards the end of the month. The feature uses 🔊 ultrasound proximity to streamline the process of launching a meeting from your 💻 laptop in an unbooked meeting room. Upon 🖱️ clicking the new option from a laptop, the meeting room will 📞 join the call, is automatically ✅ booked (if enabled) and you will be checked into 👥 companion mode on your laptop. As part of its general release, “Connect room” will also feature room disambiguation, allowing you to choose a specific room if more than one was detected, and UI tooltips that include instructions on how to use the feature.

The last announcement for Google Meet in April was an update to Gemini’s ✍️ “Take notes for me”, enabling Gemini to soon capture all of the outcomes from a call. They’ll be recorded in a new “Decisions” section in the meeting notes and be placed under labels such as ✅ “Aligned”, 🤔 “Needs further discussion”, 🙅 “Disagreed” or 🕸️ “Shelved” to help you keep track of what was finalised and what may still need to be discussed. Additionally, you’ll also be able to ✏️ customise the notes by selecting which of the specific sections should be included in the 📃 document; for a meeting, you can toggle off the new decision section as well as the 📝 summary, 👣 next steps and 📑 details sections.

Google Workspace

Gmail

Last month, Gmail’s 🔐 end-to-end encryption (E2EE) became available on Android and iOS devices for Gmail client-side encryption (CSE) users. This means that you’ll now be able to 📖 read and 📨 send encrypted emails using the Gmail app on your 📱 phone without the need for third-party apps. Your sensitive emails will stay protected regardless of whether the recipient opens them in the ✉️ Gmail app or in a 🌐 web browser.

📝 AI Overviews in Gmail search began rolling out to more Google Workspace tiers. The feature enables you to ask Gemini questions directly within the 🔎 search bar about anything within your emails. Gemini will then scan your inbox, pull in relevant details and generate a summary with the answer so that you don’t have to go searching through multiple emails. You can use natural language to ask your questions to make it easier: for example, “What are the details of my upcoming trip to New York?”

Google Drive

By the end of April, all of the 📂 files and folders within Google Drive that have 🔐 legacy restricted access were automatically migrated to the limited access folder setting for easier management. The migration of the files to the new setting doesn't interfere with the settings for who can audit, see or access the files.

Two Gemini features in Drive graduated from beta and began rolling out more broadly last month. The first feature, ✨ Ask Gemini, enables you to converse with Gemini to explore and gain insight into all of your work, drawing on context from your Drive files, from across other Google Workspace apps and even from the web. You’ll be able to have 🧠 focused discussions about specific files, 📑 organise related files and folders with Drive projects, view your 💬 chat history and more.

The second is 📝 AI Overviews. Similar to the Gmail update, this feature helps you to save time; when you 🔎 search for information within Drive, Gemini can scan all of your 📃 documents and provide a summary at the top of your search results without the need to open each file individually. Both Ask Gemini and AI Overviews are rolling out first in English and to another 28 languages later this month.

Google Docs

Last month, Google enhanced Gemini’s 🖌️ “Help me create” and ✍️ “Help me write” in Google Docs with Workspace Intelligence. Gemini can now create fully-formatted documents from scratch and make document-wide edits with a single prompt. Gemini can provide more personalised and accurate content by understanding the context and suggest edits based on 💬 comment feedback whilst adjusting the tone and writing style to ensure consistency across the entire document. Additionally, the new “Match doc format” function allows Gemini to instantly replicate the 🎨 formatting and 📑 structural elements of an existing file, making it easier to standardise documents across your organisation.

Google Sheets

To enhance the usability and compatibility of select formulae in 📊 Google Sheets, Google rolled out an update last month that enables informational and statistical functions to more accurately 🚩 flag errors, statistical distribution functions to support more 📑 parameters and financial and array functions to provide more ✅ precise and predictable results.

There were several ✨ Gemini updates for Google Sheets amongst the announcements at Google Cloud Next. First, Google introduced the ability for you to leverage Gemini to 👷 build and ✏️ edit entire spreadsheets using ✍️ natural language. With this update, Gemini will be able handle multi-step tasks, leverage Sheet’s most advanced tools, handle complex optimisation issues and use Workspace Intelligence to pull context and data from other Workspace apps.

Next, in order to help with 📑 data entry in Sheets, the “Convert to table” prompt will now also appear when you’ve pasted unstructured text and unformatted data into a spreadsheet. When the prompt is 🖱️ clicked, Gemini will turn the text or data into an ✏️ editable table that includes headers, dropdown menus and more. Additionally, you can also use “Fill with Gemini”, a new feature that will help you to enter data faster into Sheets by intelligently predicting and populating cell values. Gemini will do this by 🕵️ identifying patterns in your existing data or by following a custom prompt.

Google then made importing, analysing and managing large data sets in Google Sheets ⚡ faster. Large spreadsheets consisting of more than one million cells will load up to 30% faster, can be filtered up to 60% faster and will apply conditional formatting up to 60% faster. Google also doubled the 🦠 cell limit to 20 million in a new closed beta.

Google Slides

At the start of the month, Google introduced the ability for Gemini in 🖼️ Google Slides to generate fully editable, brand-matched slides using dynamic layouts based on the existing slide deck or referenced 📂 Drive files. In addition to creating slides from scratch, you’ll also be able to use Gemini to create or enhance existing 🎨 slide layouts and design elements to help further elevate your presentation.

Then, towards the middle of the month, a new beta feature rolled out allowing you to 📥 download and decrypt client-side 🔒 encrypted (CSE) Google Slides files, converting them directly into Microsoft PowerPoint files. The 🔀 interoperability between the two platforms ensures that 🔑 key elements remain in place, making it easier to 👥 collaborate with external organisations which may have high security requirements and prefer to use PowerPoint.

Gemini

Access to Lyria 3 Pro in the Gemini app expanded to more Google Workspace tiers. Lyria 3 Pro, Gemini’s music generation model, enables you to create 🎵 soundtracks of up to 3 minutes from a text prompt. It also provides better 🎨 customisation capabilities, tailoring elements such as the verses, choruses, musical style and more in many different languages.

In the middle of the month, Google brought the Gemini app to macOS, enabling you to access Gemini natively from your desktop using a ⌨️ keyboard shortcut rather than needing to constantly switch between windows. With the Gemini app, you’ll also be able to 🖥️ share your screen with Gemini to get instant context about what you're seeing.

Gemini has the ability to generate documents in various 📂 file formats, including Workspace files like Google Docs, Sheets and Slides, and at the end of the month Google introduced support for even more file types, including Microsoft Office (Word and Excel). This means that, instead of manually copying Gemini’s output into different apps, you can save time by asking Gemini to create a 📑 formatted file that’s ready to share from a ✍️ single prompt, directly in the app.

Google Forms

As of last month, more people will now be able to leverage Gemini for assistance when creating forms in 📋 Google Forms. Specifically, “Help me create” now supports an additional 21 languages whilst the Gemini-powered question suggestion feature gained support for an additional 28 languages. This allows you to use Gemini to help you create forms in many more languages, including 🇫🇷 French, 🇮🇩 Indonesian, 🇪🇸 Spanish, 🇵🇹 Portuguese, 🇹🇷 Turkish and many more.

Google Vids

Over the past month, there were several updates to 🤖 AI avatars within Google Vids. First, Google rolled out the ability to use ✍️ text prompts to customise and refine the avatars. This includes being able to change things like 👗 outfits, 👓 accessories and the 🖼️ background. Another update then enabled prompts that could direct the avatars to perform various 👋 actions and have them interact with specific objects in customised locations, all whilst the 🧑 faces and 🗣️ voices of the avatars stayed more consistent across all of the 🎬 generated scenes. Lastly, to further personalise the avatars, you could begin incorporating branding elements, such as the avatar wearing your company’s name on a 👕 shirt or logo on a 🧢 hat throughout the videos.

A new 🔗 Google Vids Screen Recorder extension was made available in April for the Chrome browser. It lets you record your 🖥️ screen, 📷 camera or both without having to first open 📹 Google Vids. With the extension, you can click a button to initiate a screen recording of up to 30 minutes directly from any browser tab. This will create a video which you can 👀 preview and ✏️ edit in Vids before sharing.

In order to reduce the manual steps involved when uploading your videos from 📹 Google Vids to YouTube, there’s a new dedicated 🖱️ button within Google Vids to export the video straight to YouTube.

In the middle of April, Google updated the process of converting a Google Slides presentation into a 📹 video in Google Vids to provide more ✏️ editing control over the 📜 AI-generated script before the video is created. There will now be a script editor that enables you to ✅ review and 📝 tailor the script to your needs before the first video draft, minimising the need for you to make back-and-forth edits in the main Vids editor after the 🎬 video, 🗣️ voiceovers and ✨ animations have already been generated.

Lastly, you’ll be able to deploy AI voiceovers to read your script in 30 new conversational voices and 16 more languages, including 🇫🇷 French, 🇮🇩 Indonesian, 🇹🇭 Thai and 🇺🇦 Ukranian.

Google Admin Panel

Last month, Google launched a new open beta to allow non-Google users to book Google Workspace resources, including 🖥️ rooms and 🚗 cars, directly from their third-party 📅 calendar platform of choice, such as Microsoft Outlook. Admins can grant permissions to specific groups of non-Google users, 💬 set up automated replies for different resources as well as configure 🔀 Calendar Interop for organisations that utilise both Google Workspace and Microsoft Outlook.

Google consolidated all of the 🧑‍💻 admin settings for Gemini Enterprise into a single new “Generative AI” section section within the Google admin panel. Instead of navigating between multiple menus to manage your ✨ AI tools, this section provides a more streamlined and centralised location to alter data sharing configurations and other settings. There are still independent controls for access to Workspace data based on your licences to help you protect 🔐 sensitive data and prepare for more licence-specific features in the future.

Data import, a new data migration tool, was introduced near the end of April to make it easier to 🔁 migrate your organisation to Google Workspace. There is no additional cost for the tool itself and it allows you to manage and deploy the migration tool directly from the admin panel without the need for any third-party tools. Admins will also be able to utilise the new migration planning utility to ⌛ estimate how long the migration will take and 📑 organise users into speed-optimised batches.

At the end of the month, Google began enhancing the Workspace audit logs by adding expanded event fields to help admins identify potential 🔐 security issues. Admins will be able to see the 👤owner of resources, more comprehensive information about the 💻 device used, such as the device ID and OS version, as well as resource and actor attributes for more data sources, including Google Chrome, Voice and more.

Google Workspace Studio

Google added an 💎 “Ask a Gem” step into Google Workspace Studio, allowing you to incorporate your custom AI assistants into your automated workflows. By directing the workflow to your custom Gem, you can utilise your configured AI assistants to automate the task in the specific way you want, like for drafting 📄 documents or creating 📝 short summaries.

Catch up on March’s updates

Do you want to see what happened in March? You can catch up on all of the updates across Google Meet and Google Workspace in our March 2026 recap.

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